Systemic Liberty & Component Freedom

Components act as units of teleonomic reproduction. They warrant attention as objects reliable as decision nodes. Complex networks of nodes may develop based on simple decision rules despite the pressures of entropy. If the nodes are not stable enough in the reproduction of decision rules, network complexity will not arise. Node reproduction relies on the equilibrium-stable identity maintained. Free play can generate networks, but continuous irreducibility and consistent rule identities are prerequisites of system regeneration.

Freedom of unrestricted components in any system of exchange manifests as unmanaged, uncoordinated interaction of market tacticians. These desiring-machines are not only homogenous but equally rational, equally information-bearing and equally demand-producing. Lumping homogenous tactical components creates unstable networks but fails to produce stable complex adaptive systems. Complex adaptive systems require objectification of nodes as homogenous resources. Therefore, freedom without accumulation of inequalities produces an enormous, boring aggregate of bacterium, heaped in a pile.

The pressure to submit to rules of objectification arises out of power-law dynamics; will-to-power is this final power-law trajectory of the cosmos. These competing systemic forces shape the success of free play at many levels of continuous irreducibility. Without gravity, magnetism, sexuality, pain, discontent, axiomatic drives so ingrained in our sense of mastery that very few recognize their enslavement, the system breaks out of the cadence of synchronization. Homogenous freedom, perfect equality of all components, results in a non-system.

Morality in practice develops consistent rules of ethics. Politics reproduce these ethical systems. Freedom and equality cannot form a complex system of teleonomic reproduction. The State (as with the body, the cosmos) cannot empower its citizens beyond a certain limit of relative freedoms, disseminated through its system of inequalities, justified by the morality of its axiomatics. There can be no anarchy-state. Any freedom of socioeconomic exchange and any individualization of sociopolitical force is thereby post-paternalistic, all liberation is post-despotic.

We find this easy to accept so long as the law is orders of magnitude away from our daily exchange relations. Systems of relations and variables are always systems of inequalities, not only in the mathematic but also the social phase space. Without these inequalities, there is no differentiation of variables, no separation of space-time, no mass or gravity, no weak or strong nuclear force. It is only through an anti-equality, heterogeneity in four or more dimensions, that the system can intelligibly produce homogeneity of one category versus another.

The supply curve emerges unequal to but continuously relating in juxtaposition with the demand curve. The exponential decay of economies of scale emerge unequal but continuously relating to the exponential growth of inventory holding costs. It is precisely when we chain together the abstraction of any given variable into a continuous function that probable inequality is meaningful despite the complete absence of a single representative for the inequalities of the system.

How silly of us to say, as it were, that this particularized man is a “demand variable” or that particularized woman is a “supply variable” of these socioeconomic networks! This was always the fantastic insight of the economics and physics of the early Modern Era – when we take an economic view of a sociopolitical system, there is no need to find any particularized representative of inequalities. The gradation of ranks emerges without management, though this is frequently a mismanagement. Emergent systems only need continuous sampling to keep the function unequal, and thereby meaningful, in comparison to other functions.

We can see that an increasing comfort with abstraction, probability, and tolerance limits has driven human progress. For example, the ability to symbolize (representation) not actual inventory, nor actual intrinsic worth, nor actual persons who exchange, but the logical set of all items held, all wealth accumulated, all persons who may exchange. Only then does the human symbolization of inventory, particles, and citizens plot into waves of normalized, probable, continuous possibilities.

To the quantum system, truth-value is a particle; but it is only a particle in principle. The statistician’s real and indoctrinated citizen must exist somewhere in this probability density of the population. Is she economic supply or demand? Is he political inventory holding cost or political transaction cost? These systems of inequalities are vectors, but only in aggregated calculation, in sufficient populations, driving us toward that ultimate capitalist conclusion – s/he is a superposition vector

Superposition citizenship, a moving-forward forward concretization, a superposition of a multitude of vectors, functions, calculi, and inequalities. The citizen is a particle of the social fabric, if only in principle. The atomic particle and the quantum particle are likewise citizens in principle. These are all inventions of the human mind, “real” functions, mathematically, but non-actual existentially. How lucky for us that such schizophrenia and bipolarity, such increasing alienation of probability from singularity, turned out to be pragmatically essential to a digital revolution that will self-perpetuate, remembering our imaginary simulacra on our behalf!

However, we come to an uncomfortable relation in singularity. Who am I, in a phase of recursive reflexivity, when my most reliable identity is the one defined by standard deviations from a particularized citizen that is true “in principle” beyond a reasonable doubt, but is axiomatized upon the acceptance that existential instantiation is merely relative? The failure of unquestioned personal morality lies in unquestioning submission to the ethics of the political system. More often, this results in displacement into some invasive ideology as system of denial, because the system of values has become morally bankrupt. This is a pornographization of the soul (even in the absence of gods) that would make the most despotic of the medieval popes jealous. The consumer-citizen no longer compelled to produce or consume commodities; that is a foregone conclusion. The weak, cowardly, distracted soul must now produce and consume itself. This production is relative to the gravitational pull of normalized continuous citizenship waves, again, in principle.